Our return to the travel narration next takes us to an extremely important event, but one to which Nephi pays little attention; the marriages between those traveling together.
Zoram marries the eldest of the five daughters of Ishmael, and may therefore be presumed to be older than the sons of Lehi (Hugh Nibley, Teachings of the Book of Mormon, Semester 1, p.211).
As for the marriages between Ishamael's daughters and Lehi's sons, Nibley suggests that these intermarriages might be following established custom: "Lehi himself is of Manasseh. The rule among these people is that you must marry your bint amm, paternal uncle. Every girl must marry the brother of her father. It's very likely that Lehi and Ishmael were brothers because they were both of the tribe of Manasseh. Manasseh was the desert tribe (Hugh Nibley, Teachings of the Book of Mormon, Semester 1, p.167.)
The suggestion that they were brothers of the same tribe does not fit, however, with the statement of Elder Erastus Snow:
"The Prophet Joseph informed us that the record of Lehi, was contained on the 116 pages that were first translated and subsequently stolen, and of which an abridgement is given us in the first Book of Nephi, which is the record of Nephi individually, he himself being of the lineage of Manasseh; but that Ishmael was of the lineage of Ephraim, and that his sons married into Lehi's family, and Lehi's sons married Ishmael's daughters, thus fulfilling the words of Jacob upon Ephraim and Manasseh in the 48th chapter of Genesis, which says: "And let my name be named on them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the land" (Journal of Discourses, Vol.23, p.182 - p.183 - p.184, Erastus Snow, May 6, 1882).
The known makeup of the group traveling together at this time consists of Lehi and Sariah, Ishmael and his wife, the two sons and five daughters of Ishmael, the four sons of Lehi, and Zoram. With the marriages indicated here, we have the four sons of Lehi married to four of the daughters of Ishmael, and the fifth as the bride of Zoram. The sons of Ishmael were already married and brought their families with them (1 Nephi 7:6).